grrrr … i didn’t like high school then, and i don’t like it now

When you were in high school, did you ever feel like you must surely be from another planet? Did you, perhaps, eat lunch in the library (or even in the math room!) to avoid your fellow classmates? Guess who wasn’t popular back then. I never did get the point of being popular – from my outsider’s point of view, it didn’t really look like that much fun. Always worrying what someone else was saying (or even thinking) about you, always trying to devise some new way of coming across cooler than anyone else … and the surest, simplest,  most effective way of making oneself look better seemed to be by making those around one look worse.

It seems like some of us still haven’t outgrown that particular disorder. I’m referring to Mary Ann’s blog post for today. This is the comment I tried to leave, but couldn’t, because Mary Ann has felt the need to close her blog to comments due to the cowardly, anonymous email sent to her.

Someone is simply trying to stir up trouble – and I’m really tired of people sniping like this, making good people feel bad for no earthly reason. Your stitching is lovely, your posts are interesting, and I (among others!) come visit you here because I enjoy it – not because I feel obligated!

People should remember that this is an online community, a group of friends. If someone’s purpose here is to stir up trouble and make others feel inadequate – go someplace else!!

Seriously,  most of us have real issues to deal with in real life that are painful enough – ill health, loss of a loved one, depression, employment woes, etc. – and this wonderful online community of fellow stitchers provides us with a moment in our day when we can lay down our burdens, anxieties, anguishes … and just enjoy each other’s company. It’s not a popularity contest, thank the heavens; it’s just a little niche out of the way for some nice people to engage in some chitchat, a little sharing, some pretty pictures …. Something we all need and look forward to. If there are people out there looking for something else, who need some extra nastiness in their lives – go look for it elsewhere.

a new season, a new look

The blue template with a picture of Maine’s coast was perfect for the summer months – but now that autumn is upon us, I felt the need to change my look. Though the gray background is rather dark, the pictures really pop out. Sort of like autumn itself – rather on the dark side, but that just serves to showcase the beauties of the season that much better. I hope you like it (and if you experience any problems, please let me know!).

Wishing one and all a wonderful weekend. I’ll be working on Donald Duck to ensure that he makes it into Monday’s mail.

St. Jan’s church, Gouda

This morning, Nicky and I met up with Jim and Gaby, who’d passed a delicious night’s rest at their hotel (the Utrechtse Dom) and walked around Gouda’s 15/16th centry gothic-style St. Jan’s church. The church is located at the central market square and I’ve learned that it is the longest church building in the Netherlands, at 123 meters. Gaby thought it would be interesting to go in, and I had to admit that although I’ve lived here for over 6 years, I’d  never been inside. Thank heavens for visitors who cause us to rediscover our surroundings!

Though I have to admit I’ve been inside more spectacular churches, the stained glass windows at St. Jan’s are some of the most glorious I’ve seen. Gaby told me that her grandfather was a stained-glass craftsman in Germany up until his death. That made me even more appreciative of the beauty of the windows. We weren’t really supposed to take pictures, although no one commented on the other visitors who were snapping away, so I only took a few. My favorite is the picture of Jim, Gaby and  Nicky sitting on a bench outside the museum which is located beside the church. All can be clicked for more detail.

this is something i’d like to live up to

I’m just goofing around while Niek and Nicky do the shopping and check out 7 – 9 seat vehicles. Gulp - we need to buy a bus! I’m stitching La-D-Da’s “A Bushel & A Peck” as a wedding gift for a very dear friend, but there’s not enough to make for an interesting picture. Tomorrow, maybe. And on the subject of stitching, thank you so much for your really wonderful, kind comments about Jim and Gaby’s anniversary gift! I hope they like it as much as you did! I mailed it yesterday and I hope I’ll get lucky and it will arrive sooner rather than later. Tanya, thanks for your wonderful designs! And now, on to the silliness!

 

You are The Hierophant

Divine Wisdom. Manifestation. Explanation. Teaching.

All things relating to education, patience, help from superiors.The Hierophant is often considered to be a Guardian Angel.

The Hierophant’s purpose is to bring the spiritual down to Earth. Where the High Priestess between her two pillars deals with realms beyond this Earth, the Hierophant (or High Priest) deals with worldly problems. He is well suited to do this because he strives to create harmony and peace in the midst of a crisis. The Hierophant’s only problem is that he can be stubborn and hidebound. At his best, he is wise and soothing, at his worst, he is an unbending traditionalist.

What Tarot Card are You?
Take the Test to Find Out.

And – as they say – opposites must really attract, because here is the card that my better half came up with:

You are The Devil

Materiality. Material Force. Material temptation; sometimes obsession

The Devil is often a great card for business success; hard work and ambition.

Perhaps the most misunderstood of all the major arcana, the Devil is not really “Satan” at all, but Pan the half-goat nature god and/or Dionysius. These are gods of pleasure and abandon, of wild behavior and unbridled desires. This is a card about ambitions; it is also synonymous with temptation and addiction. On the flip side, however, the card can be a warning to someone who is too restrained, someone who never allows themselves to get passionate or messy or wild – or ambitious. This, too, is a form of enslavement. As a person, the Devil can stand for a man of money or erotic power, aggressive, controlling, or just persuasive. This is not to say a bad man, but certainly a powerful man who is hard to resist. The important thing is to remember that any chain is freely worn. In most cases, you are enslaved only because you allow it.

What Tarot Card are You?
Take the Test to Find Out.‘

 

I’ve also been tagged by Teejay, so here are my five things. I’m not tagging anyone; jump in if you want to.

Five things to do before I die, in no particular order:
Visit Alaska
Move back to Maine
Watch my kids grow up and, hopefully, my grandkids
Write something besides technical manuals
Make some tiny bit of the world somehow a better place

Five things I can do:
Enjoy hanging out with my kids
Enjoy, appreciate, and treasure my marriage
Love my family, near and far
Write, at least technical manuals
Live my life one day at a time

Five things I can’t do (probably because I’m too lazy to figure out how):
Bookkeeping – ugh!!
Talk comfortably to strangers or groups of people – yikes!
Fix anything electronic
Hang anything straight
Identify the birds and plants around me without a guidebook

Five things that attract me to the opposite sex:
Intelligence
Kindness
Humor
Height
Hands

Celebrity crushes (I’ve had very few of these, so I’ve had to stretch a bit, okay?):
Mr. Spock (I wanted to marry him when I grew up)
Donald Sutherland (tall blondes – is it any wonder I wound up in the Netherlands? LOL!)
Keanu Reeves
Jodie Foster (crushes can include girls, can’t they?)
Tom Robbins (I’ve no idea what he looks like, but his books crack me up)

happy independence day

As those who know me best are already aware, the Fourth of July isn’t normally one of my favorite  holidays, nor am I what you could call a flag-waving American. But this year I wish I were celebrating with family in Maine.

To all the families who have lost loved ones in the military service (and sadly, that includes my own) and to all the families who have loved ones far away, I wish you peace. I wish us all peace in these troubled and confusing times!

And on a much lighter note, I wish myself a 4th of July picnic with all the fixings and a spectacular fireworks display with my kids cuddled around me, wide-eyed with wonder.

o, canada

Happy Canada Day to all my Canadian friends, and to all the friendly Canadians I haven’t yet met.

Maria has some beautiful Canada Day projects over at Cyberstitchers, which is also featuring a gallery of Canada Day projects – happy looking!

Edited to add: Judging by some of the comments, I wasn’t clear enough in specifying that the sampler I’ve shown here is one of Maria’s wonderful Canada Day projects. (My personal favorite of the ones she made .) I can’t take credit for such beautiful work(wo)manship.

a UFO comes to light

Thanks to a remarkably understanding husband, I did enjoy my day of vegging out and stitching. What a pleasure!! This morning, I gave in to the increasing internal pressure to resume a sea dragon I started for Max ages ago and gave up on when I couldn’t find the right color combination for its wings (flippers?). All of a sudden, it just clicked in my brain and I almost immediately pulled out exactly the colors I needed. Of course, some frogging had to be done – always a pain – but I managed to get a decent little bit done on it before Max got home. I’m keeping it a secret, rather than getting his hopes up that I’ll have it done for his birthday.

Here’s where I left it, sometime last year:

And here’s what it looked like when I hid it just before he came home:

I also started one of my remaining pay-it-forward gifts. I had picked out a project for this person, but it was much too large for me to get done at this time and I don’t want to keep her waiting. This morning a perfect (smaller) design literally jumped out at me and I got it started. I’m really happy with it, but you’ll have to wait for pictures. Speaking of the PIF gifties, I don’t believe I ever posted the one sent to Cathy, though she did show it on her blog. The colors are better IRL – a golden Quaker fabric with DMC 4030.

And tonight I resumed my exchange project. I wish the time wasn’t flying by so fast – I enjoy this one, and the colors are very soothing. I’d like to linger over it, but … time stands still for no woman.

Another busy week on the horizon. In addition to my usual work duties, I’m supposed to write the scripts for the upcoming two training videos. I guess it’s only fair as I’m the ‘voice’ for them. Yep, somehow I wound up becoming the online voice for our software product. Life is too funny. On Friday, I have another full day at my external internship and on Saturday I have a full day for my internal internship arranged by the school. I wish the knowledge would penetrate faster. It’s hard to accept that I simply do not learn as fast as I did 15 or 20 years ago. But I am committed to the study. I’m even trying to get Niek to go to an acupuncturist for some persistant pain in his shoulder from an old sports injury. So far he’s only smiling and changing the subject.

If you don’t hear much from me this week, it’s just because I’m running around. I hope all is going well with you!

i used to be organized …

I mean like compulsively organized. By subject, alphabet and date. By color, size, sentimental value, legal importance. I not only bought colored tabs and dividers, I used them. And if I ran out of the blue tab holders I would go out and buy another pack, even if I had leftovers in all the other colors. I was a little … odd … about my mania for orderliness. I’d straighten the shelves if I went to a store. The guy at Strawberries (does this music store chain still exist?) used to both love and hate to see me coming. It was irritating to see me straightening all the shelves and racks, but it meant he didn’t have to do it himself.

But that was before I had kids. I could tell you some other things about myself that have changed since I had kids, but this is a G-rated blog. Let’s just say that I now shop for my bathing suit not to show anything off, but to cover up as much as possible. Bathing costumes would be very welcome in my gravity-ruled world.

I digress, a sure sign I’m overtired. What I started writing about is the simple fact that I cannot find my battery recharger. “Not too interesting” I can hear you thinking. But my camera’s batteries died just after I took a final picture of my Valentine exchange piece before surrendering it to the postal service, and now I have no stitchy pictures to share with you. Hopefully the mail will continue to be super-quick and a certain someone will receive it soon. Maybe by then, I’ll have even found the recharger.

new home

I gave it up as a lost cause with Blogger after months (and months) of small irritations building into greater ones. I tried out several other free sites and looked into a few that aren’t free, but when Karen made the move to WordPress and sent me an email answering my questions, I decided it was high time to move. I’m sure that over time I’ll adjust the template and make other small changes, but for now, here I am.

 Don’t forget to update my new address in your blogroll.

just what the doctor ordered

Wow, what a wonderful weekend away! Niek booked us a vacation house in Emmen for the weekend and it was wonderful. As if the getaway weren’t great enough, he spoiled me further by doing the cooking and shopping as well. Boy, did I ever luck out!

We arrived rather later Friday afternoon than planned and it was already getting dark so we just tucked up and enjoyed the house. On Saturday we went to the Noorder Dierenpark, a very unique zoo where a number of the animals actually wander around free. They also have a butterfly house – if I lived anywhere nearby, I’d go to that daily for a dose of magic. Those butterflies flitting around, jewel-bright, are like tiny fairies. Incredible. We saw crocodiles that actually moved, armadillos, elephants, and so much more. On Sunday, we took the kids to the indoor play area at the vacation park and they had a blast jumping into the balls, climbing ropes, sailing ships, and telling the other kids what to do. They aren’t shy children …

We wrapped the weekend up with a stop at McDonalds where all three kids got a Furby in their Happy Meal, which seemed like the crowning glory. They all slept with their little French fry-smelling critters and snuck them off to daycare and school today.

Today I went back to work and tonight I could finally resume fitness. My foot is still sensitive, but I managed to get through most of my routine and tonight it only hurts a little bit. Hard to believe that such a silly thing can be a bother for such a long time.

Not too much stitching done, but lots of fun has been had. I hope the same is true for you (the fun part, not the lack of stitching! LOL!).

These pictures are clickable.